Unbroken

"Unbroken" by Laura Hillenbrand

This might be one of the best books I have ever read. I highly recommend this book and would urge all to read it. It is a story of World War II and prisoners of war. The more stories I read about wars the more grateful I become of those who serve and sacrifice their lives for my freedom. I am in awe of all that they endure so that I can worship the God I want, be who I want and raise children that believe they can be anything they want. This story is truly amazing. "A lifetime of glory is worth a moment of pain." "He smiled without interruption." I like that line, and hope that often I can smile without interruption. I think my husband does that to me. "Men didn't go one by one. A quarter of a barracks was lost at once. There were rarely funerals, for there were rarely bodies. Men were just gone, and that was the end of it." A whole plane full of men would be killed and never found. "At intervals between a bomb falling it sounded like church: voices from nearby slit trenches all chanting the Lord's prayer together-over and over again." "Without dignity, identity is erased." A lot of men would have rather died than been a prisoner. They were no longer men but slaves or animals at the hand of the enemy. There was no dignity in the prisoner camps. "Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man's soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure, and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty." In these camps that was the goal, to deprive men of their dignity and in doing this death came quickly. "If I knew I had to go through those experiences again, I'd kill myself." This was spoken by a prisoner of war. "He was not the worthless, broken, forsaken man that the Bird had striven to make of him. In a single, silent moment, his rage, his fear, his humiliation and helplessness, had fallen away."